Careful observation can bridge the gap between seeing something virtually and witnessing the same thing in person. Although I’m no different to any other inquisitive...
I love the snake
that stifles my breath
I have built him
bit by bit
all these years
fleshed him
with fear so he moves...
The day I learned to travel was the first time I ever was truly lost.
It was 1979 and I was nine years old. Surely,...
My first meaningful encounter with food took place on the French Riviera in the summer of 1991. I don’t remember it, but the story has...
Each night my handiwork charts Calypso’s serenade, the arrival
of things that can only be made from scratch, a second language
learned by the precisionist...
Lord Kitchener, the late Trinidadian calypsonian, arrived in England on the Empire Windrush in 1948, with several songs in his back pocket. Kitchener, a then...
Dan Lagunzad was a botanist: he was built slim and thrumming, like a low, springy tree that was just a little bit taller than I...
On the pier
in the harbour of Guinea-Bissau
on the coast of West Africa,
where cashews are shipped,
and cocaine arrives daily,
they wait through...
They tell me the banked fires
on every street corner tonight
reveal in smoke and tears the face
of the one you are meant to...
It was the start of a three-day Memorial Day weekend. I stood there leaning on the counter, watching my folks’ forest green Lincoln Continental pull...
Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse were university chums. Hobby had been best man at Byron’s unlikely and short-lived wedding to Annabella Milbanke in 1815,...
It was in the town of Shkodra, in northern Albania, that I first picked up the name Edith Durham. Strolling the streets in the dry...
Roll. Pinch. Smash. Roll. All in one swift smooth motion, a chef rolled dough into cylinders, pinched off equally-sized chunks, smashed each with the palm...
When the ordinary has become too safe,
too stale, we are advised to make it strange,
to look again, and magnify until the edges blur,...
All these for my lover:
A rocket science
Telescopes
A map of Jupiter
And a lantern —
Burning from the lips
I love you and...
Once upon a time, the Princess circulated a rumour. It began on her island at the top of her tower, in her round room, at...
Over 1,200 years ago, disgruntled Norse Viking sailed northward and started a new society, complete with a parliament, on an island they called Snæland, “land...
I look at the traffic, coming in droves from all sides: mopeds, taxis, pick-up trucks, and bicycles. The mopeds are the most impressive; some solely...
He’d been silent, the other man at the bar, gazing into his glass of whiskey before growing animated at the mention of Mark Twain. “I...
Candle flame on cold pillar tallow,
Wick bent to dip of our wings,
Lighting up naught over naught of our lift,
Stretched days direct most...